I Would Like You For My Own

She & Him “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” – A lot of actors and actresses make a go at pop music, but nearly all of them fail for two basic reasons — first, their taste is mundane and their tunes are ordinary at best, and second, they are not successful in translating their appeal on screen to a medium in which their body is invisible to the audience. Zooey Deschanel makes it work on her first album with M. Ward mainly because good — decidely retro — taste is crucial to her aesthetic, and perhaps more than any other actress of her generation, she has developed a persona that is at once seemingly authentic, and precisely calibrated to make a specific segment of the population swoon.

This is what comes across on the She & Him record — even with your eyes closed, she fully inhabits her character: Shockingly beautiful, but incongruously modest. Cute, coy, and self-aware. A bit old fashioned, but firmly rooted in the present. Small town, with just a dash of big city. She plays the extraordinarily pretty girl next door who is inexplicably unconceited and unpretentious, and has a carefully curated vintage wardrobe, a big box of old vinyl records, and a taste for sweet, low key romance. This may or may not be the actual Zooey Deschanel, but that’s irrelevant — she’s so good at selling this persona that if it’s at all a put-on, it’s hard to spot the seams in her fabrication.

Deschanel doesn’t come to the She & Him record with a desire to reinvent herself as a rock star a la Juliette Lewis, and there’s no assumption that we’re getting anything particularly confessional or revealing. Instead, we get a concentrated dose of Zooey-ness in the form of well-crafted old school pop songs that showcase her sweetness, humor, and humility. The best songs sound like a sunny day in a perfect world, and encourage the listener to imagine that they are somehow either inhabiting the life of her character, or that she is singing to them. “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” in particular makes me miss Gilmore Girls in the worst way — it’s really a shame that the series ended too soon for Lorelai or Rory to stroll through Stars Hollow, completely at one with its gentle, adorable whimsy. (Click here to buy it from Merge.)